In the United States alone, over 100 million people have chronic health conditions, accounting for an estimated $700 billion in annual medical costs. In an effort to control these medical costs many healthcare providers have initiated outpatient or home healthcare programs for their patients. The potential benefits of these programs are particularly great for chronically ill patients who must treat their diseases on a daily basis. However, the success of these programs is dependent upon the ability of the healthcare providers to monitor the patients remotely to avert medical problems before they become complicated and costly. Further, success requires compliance with the program, which is often dependent on providing messages or other reminders to patients so that they will stay with the program. Unfortunately, no convenient and cost effective monitoring system exists to accomplish these objectives. While these problems are particularly acute for the poor and the elderly, all demographic groups could significantly benefit from remote communication and monitoring systems.
Prior attempts to monitor patients remotely have included the use of personal computers and modems to establish communication between patients and healthcare providers, either directly or via an Internet site. However, computers are too expensive to give away and the patients who already own computers are only a fraction of the total population.
Other attempts to monitor patients remotely have included the use of medical monitoring devices with built-in modems. Examples of such monitoring devices include blood glucose meters, respiratory flow meters, and heart rate monitors. While these devices can be quite successful, their multimedia capabilities are often limited. In addition, many patients simply may prefer to interact with a device they are more familiar with, such as a television.
Prior attempts to monitor patients remotely have also included the use of interactive telephone or video response systems. Such interactive systems are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,390,238 issued to Kirk et al. on Feb. 14, 1995, U.S. Pat. No. 5,434,611 issued to Tamura on Jul. 18, 1995, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,441,047 issued to David et al. on Aug. 15, 1995. One disadvantage of these systems is that they either require a patient to call in to a central facility to be monitored or require the central facility to call the patient according to a rigid monitoring schedule.
If the patients are required to call the central facility, only the compliant patients will actually call regularly to be monitored. Non-compliant patients will typically wait until an emergency situation develops before contacting their healthcare provider, thus defeating the purpose of the monitoring system. If the central facility calls each patient according to a monitoring schedule, it is intrusive to the patient's life and resistance to the monitoring grows over time. Further, it is difficult to identify each patient uniquely using these systems. Moreover, these systems are generally incapable of collecting medical data from monitoring devices, such as blood glucose meters, respiratory flow meters, or heart rate monitors.
As such, there exists a need for a simple and inexpensive system for remotely monitoring patients and for easily communicating information to the patients. There is also a need to encourage patient's compliance with a prescribed treatment plan.